I’m grateful to J. K. Gayle for drawing the data graphed above to my attention. It shows just how recently the obsession with being “biblical” and all things “biblical” began to take off. There is a lot that can be learned by looking at how the frequency of a word changes over time in publications. [Read more...]

For those of us who’ve long been waiting, there is good news: the mobile app for the American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting in November is now available! ANNUAL MEETING MOBILE APP IS AVAILABLE! Plan Your Meeting with the free Annual Meetings mobile app! AAR and SBL introduces the use [Read More...]

I learned today via IO9 that Google has made it as official as Google can make things: “Literally” now means “literally” but also the opposite. Actually, perhaps I should ask whether literally now literally means “not literally,” or whether literally now still means “literally,” but means it figuratively as well as literally. When people misuse [Read More...]

Brian LePort has posted two wonderful blog entries about stereotypes regarding denominations, as indicated by Google search autocomplete data. I thought I would check what happens when I type in the labels that I wear – American Baptist and progressive Christian. Neither has anything for the entire phrases (such as “Why are American Baptists” or [Read More...]

Some of you may have experienced slow load times or error messages on this blog in the past. The cause was apparently my sidebar widget which shared interesting posts elsewhere. If the RSS feed that it was trying to pull failed to respond, the widget would wait for it and the blog page would fail [Read More...]

If you are reading this in Google Reader, you probably need this reminder. Google Reader will cease to be available on July 1st and you will lose all your feeds and other data if you have not exported them before then. I have been using The Old Reader, because I want to be able to [Read More...]

For those who are students, or who do research and/or write for a living, the data we have – papers that are due, articles that we are working on – is more valuable than the devices we use to write on. And so anyone who is not currently using Dropbox, or Google Drive, or some [Read More...]

We sometimes complain about unnecessary resistance to change, but not all change is good. When Google Reader eliminated the share function, it was a nuisance. Now that Google Reader is getting ready to go defunct, many are equally frustrated. Fortunately, there seems to be a viable solution already available: The Old Reader. I’m not sure [Read More...]

It seems that Google Reader is being done away with (“retired” seems to be the preferred term). I suppose that means that I will have to find another feed reader for all my blogs and news feeds that I read – which almost certainly includes yours, if you have one. And so if you want me [Read More...]

As I focus in my classes on the skills needed to search for and find relevant and reliable information, that topic in the news. Bill Tai was quoted in the New York Times today as saying the following: When there is too much information, there is high value in search, navigation and discovery. This is [Read More...]

The new semester at Butler University begins on Monday. My course on the Bible is at the same time a course on how to use the internet. The need for training in such skills is illustrated well by this image that has been circulating on Facebook: Whether or not to take advantage of the accessibility [Read More...]